Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky

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Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky

Paraskevidekatriaphobia: Fear of Friday the 13th

I just finished reading the abstract of a study published in the British
Medical Journal in 1993 entitled "Is Friday the 13th Bad for Your
Health?" With the aim of mapping "the relation between health,
behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United
Kingdom," its authors compared the ratio of traffic volume to the
number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th
and Friday the 13th, over a period of years.

Incredibly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently
fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the
number of hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents
was significantly higher than on "normal" Fridays.

"Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission
as a result of a transport accident may be increased by
as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended."

Paraskevidekatriaphobics— people afflicted
with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th — must be
pricking up their ears just now, buoyed by seeming evidence
that their terror may not be so irrational after all. But it's unwise
to take solace in a single scientific study — the only one of its kind,
so far as I know — especially one so peculiar. I suspect these
statistics have more to teach us about human psychology than
the ill-fatedness of any particular date on the calendar.

Friday the 13th - The Most Widespread Superstition?

The sixth day of the week and the number 13 both
have foreboding reputations said to date from ancient
times, and their inevitable conjunction from one to three
times a year portends more misfortune than some
credulous minds can bear. Some sources say it may be
the most widespread superstition in the United States.
Some people won't go to work on Friday the 13th; some
won't eat in restaurants; many wouldn't think of setting a
wedding on the date.

Just how many Americans at the turn of the millennium
still suffer from this condition? According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a
psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of phobias
(and coiner of the term "paraskevidekatriaphobia"),
the figure may be as high as 21 million. If he's right, eight
percent of Americans are still in the grips of a very old
superstition.

Exactly how old is difficult to say, because determining
the origins of superstitions is an imprecise science, at best.
In fact, it's mostly guesswork.

13: The Devil's Dozen
It is said: If 13 people sit down to dinner together, all will die
within the year. The Turks so disliked the number 13 that it
was practically expunged from their vocabulary (Brewer, 1894).
Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue. Many
buildings don't have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your
name, you will have the devil's luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson,
Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have
13 letters in their names). There are 13 witches in a coven.

Though no one can say for sure when and why human beings first
associated the number 13 with misfortune, the belief is assumed to
be quite old, and there exist any number of theories — all of which
have been called into question at one time or another, I should
point out — purporting to trace its origins to antiquity and beyond.

It has been proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the number
13 are as ancient as the act of counting. Primitive man had only his
10 fingers and two feet to represent units, this explanation goes,
so he could count no higher than 12. What lay beyond that
— 13 — was an impenetrable mystery to our prehistoric forebears,
hence an object of superstition.

Which has an edifying ring to it, but one is left wondering
— did primitive man not have toes?

Despite whatever terrors the numerical unknown held for their
hunter-gatherer ancestors, ancient civilizations weren't unanimous
in their dread of 13. The Chinese regarded the number as lucky,
some commentators note, as did the Egyptians in the time of
the pharaohs.

To the ancient Egyptians, these sources tell us, life was a quest
for spiritual ascension which unfolded in stages — 12 in this life and
a 13th beyond, thought to be the eternal afterlife. The number 13
therefore symbolized death — not in terms of dust and decay,
but as a glorious and desirable transformation. Though Egyptian
civilization perished, the symbolism conferred on the number 13 by
its priesthood survived, only to be corrupted by subsequent
cultures who came to associate 13 with a fear of death instead
of a reverence for the afterlife.

Anathema

Other sources speculate that the number 13 may have been
purposely vilified by the founders of patriarchal religions in the
early days of western civilization because it represented femininity.
Thirteen had been revered in prehistoric goddess-worshiping cultures,
we are told, because it corresponded to the number of lunar
(menstrual) cycles in a year (13 x 28 = 364 days). The "Earth
Mother of Laussel," for example — a 27,000-year-old carving
found near the Lascaux caves in France often cited as an icon of
matriarchal spirituality — depicts a female figure holding a cresent-
shaped horn bearing 13 notches. As the solar calendar triumphed
over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated civilization, it is
surmised, so did the number 12 over the number 13, thereafter
considered anathema.

On the other hand, one of the earliest concrete taboos associated
with the number 13 — a taboo still observed by some superstitious
folks today, evidently — is said to have originated in the East with
the Hindus, who believed, for reasons I haven't been able to ascertain,
that it is always unlucky for 13 people to gather in one place — say,
at dinner. Interestingly enough, precisely the same superstition has
been attributed to the ancient Vikings (though I have also been told,
for what it's worth, that this and the accompanying mythographical
explanation are apocryphal). The story has been laid down as follows:

Loki, the Evil One

Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki,
the Evil One, god of mischief, had been left off the guest list
but crashed the party, bringing the total number of attendees
to 13. True to character, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind
god of winter, to attack Balder the Good, who was a favorite of
the gods. Hod took a spear of mistletoe offered by Loki and
obediently hurled it at Balder, killing him instantly. All Valhalla
grieved. And although one might take the moral of this story
to be "Beware of uninvited guests bearing mistletoe," the Norse
themselves apparently concluded that 13 people at a dinner
party is just plain bad luck.

As if to prove the point, the Bible tells us there were exactly
13 present at the Last Supper. One of the dinner guests
— er, disciples — betrayed Jesus Christ, setting the stage
for the Crucifixion.

Did I mention the Crucifixion took place on a Friday?

Bad Friday
It is said: Never change your bed on Friday; it will bring
bad dreams. Don't start a trip on Friday or you will have
misfortune. If you cut your nails on Friday, you cut them
for sorrow. Ships that set sail on a Friday will have bad
luck – as in the tale of H.M.S. Friday ... One hundred years
ago, the British government sought to quell once and for
all the widespread superstition among seamen that setting
sail on Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned,
named "H.M.S. Friday." They laid her keel on a Friday,
launched her on a Friday, selected her crew on a Friday and
hired a man named Jim Friday to be her captain. To top it off,
H.M.S. Friday embarked on her maiden voyage on a Friday,
and was never seen or heard from again.

Some say Friday's bad reputation goes all the way back to
the Garden of Eden.
It was on a Friday, supposedly, that Eve tempted Adam
with the forbidden fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned in
Sunday School, and they were both ejected from Paradise.
Tradition also holds that the Great Flood began on a Friday;
God tongue-tied the builders of the Tower of Babel on a Friday;
the Temple of Solomon was destroyed on a Friday; and, of
course, Friday was the day of the week on which Christ
was crucified. It is therefore a day of penance for Christians.

In pagan Rome, Friday was execution day (later Hangman's
Day in Britain), but in other pre-Christian cultures it was
the sabbath, a day of worship, so those who indulged in
secular or self-interested activities on that day could not expect
to receive blessings from the gods — which may explain the
lingering taboo on embarking on journeys or starting i
mportant projects on Fridays.

To complicate matters, these pagan associations were
not lost on the early Church, which went to great lengths
to suppress them. If Friday was a holy day for heathens,
the Church fathers felt, it must not be so for
Christians — thus it became known in the Middle
Ages as the "Witches' Sabbath," and thereby hangs
another tale.

The Witch-Goddess

The name "Friday" was derived from a Norse deity worshipped
on the sixth day, known either as Frigg (goddess of marriage
and fertility), or Freya (goddess of sex and fertility), or both,
the two figures having become intertwined in the handing-down
of myths over time (the etymology of "Friday" has been given
both ways). Frigg/Freya corresponded to Venus, the goddess
of love of the Romans, who named the sixth day of the week
in her honor "dies Veneris."

Friday was actually considered quite lucky by pre-Christian
Teutonic peoples, we are told — especially as a day to get
married — because of its traditional association with love
and fertility. All that changed when Christianity came along.
The goddess of the sixth day — most likely Freya in this context,
given that the cat was her sacred animal — was recast in
post-pagan folklore as a witch, and her day became associated
with evil doings.

Various legends developed in that vein, but one is of particular
interest: As the story goes, the witches of the north used to
observe their sabbath by gathering in a cemetery in the dark of
the moon. On one such occasion the Friday goddess, Freya herself,
came down from her sanctuary in the mountaintops and appeared
before the group, who numbered only 12 at the time, and gave
them one of her cats, after which the witches' coven — and,
by tradition, every properly-formed coven since — comprised
exactly 13.

The Unluckiest Day of All
The astute reader will have observed that while we have thus far
insinuated any number of intriguing connections between events,
practices and beliefs attributed to ancient cultures and the superstitious
fear of Fridays and the number 13, we have yet to happen upon an
explanation of how, why or when these separate strands of folklore
converged — if that is indeed what happened — to mark Friday the
13th as the unluckiest day of all.
There's a very simple reason for that — nobody really knows,
though various explanations have been proposed.

The Knights Templar

One theory, recently offered up as historical fact in the novel
The Da Vinci Code, holds that it came about not as the result
of a convergence, but a catastrophe, a single historical event that
happened nearly 700 years ago.

The catastrophe was the decimation of the Knights Templar, the
legendary order of "warrior monks" formed during the Christian
Crusades to combat Islam. Renowned as a fighting force for 200 years,
by the 1300s the order had grown so pervasive and powerful it was
perceived as a political threat by kings and popes alike and brought down
by a church-state conspiracy, as recounted by Katharine Kurtz in
Tales of the Knights Templar (Warner Books: 1995):

"On October 13, 1307, a day so infamous that Friday the 13th
would become a synonym for ill fortune, officers of King Philip IV of
France carried out mass arrests in a well-coordinated dawn raid that
left several thousand Templars — knights, sergeants, priests, and
serving brethren — in chains, charged with heresy, blasphemy,
various obscenities, and homosexual practices. None of these charges
was ever proven, even in France — and the Order was found innocent
elsewhere — but in the seven years following the arrests, hundreds of
Templars suffered excruciating tortures intended to force 'confessions,
' and more than a hundred died under torture or were executed by
burning at the stake."

A Thoroughly Modern Phenomenon

There are drawbacks to the "day so infamous" thesis, not the least of
which is that it attributes enormous cultural significance to a relatively
obscure historical event. Even more problematic, for this or any other
theory positing premodern origins for Friday the 13th superstitions,
is the fact that no one has been able to document the existence of
such beliefs prior to the 19th century. If people who lived before the
late 1800s perceived Friday the 13th as a day of special misfortune,
no evidence has been found to prove it. As a result, some scholars
are now convinced the stigma is a thoroughly modern phenomenon
exacerbated by 20th-century media hype.

Going back a hundred years, Friday the 13th doesn't even merit a
mention in E. Cobham Brewer's voluminous 1898 edition of the
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, though one does find entries for "Friday,
an Unlucky Day" and "Thirteen Unlucky." When the date of ill fate finally
does make an appearance in later editions of the text, it is without
extravagant claims as to the superstition's historicity or longevity.
The very brevity of the entry is instructive: "A particularly unlucky
Friday. See Thirteen" — implying that the extra dollop of misfortune
attributed to Friday the 13th can be accounted for in terms of an
accrual, so to speak, of bad omens:

Unlucky Friday + Unlucky 13 = Unluckier Friday. If that's the case,
we are guilty of perpetuating a misnomer by labeling Friday the 13th
"the unluckiest day of all," a designation perhaps better reserved for,
say, a Friday the 13th on which one breaks a mirror, walks under a
ladder, spills the salt, and spies a black cat crossing one's path — a day,
if there ever was one, best spent in the safety of one's own home with
doors locked, shutters closed and fingers crossed.